


Apodyopis

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Newsies (1992)
Genre: Angst, M/M, descriptions of past abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-07
Updated: 2014-11-07
Packaged: 2019-09-27 22:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17170514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: Apodyopis: The Act of mentally undressing someone.





	Apodyopis

Blink wasn’t an easy guy to get to know. He was friendly enough, sure. He was great. He was quick to smile, and quick to share a joke, but Mush knew that he hadn’t always been like that, not when he first showed up at the lodging house. Maybe the other guys knew it too, but they acted like they’d forgotten. And it wasn’t as though Mush brought up things that Blink didn’t want to acknowledge or talk about, but those were what Mush kept close to his heart, because Blink was important and they knew each other. Mush knew him.

There were times, when Mush looked at Blink, when he was playing cards with the other guys, or dancing at the bar, and Mush felt like he could see right through Blink’s shirt, to the ribbon of pale scar flesh, running down the right side of Blink’s stomach. Everybody had seen it, of course, but the thing about living with a bunch of other guys who you dressed with and showered with and couldn’t ever get a moment away from, was that it got easy to be surrounded by naked and half naked bodies and not see any of them at all. Hell, Racetrack could’ve sprouted a third nipple and a tail for all the Mush noticed (only now that he’d thought about it, he was going to have to check, just to reassure himself that he was making stuff up, because Mush could see Race being just the tricky kind of person who would parade around with a third nipple and never even tell anybody). 

But anyway, it was weird that Racetrack’s probably imaginary extra nipple was practically invisible to Mush, but the scar on Blink’s stomach stood out in his mind the way it did. Blink had been stabbed there. It said a lot about him. It said that Blink could get stabbed, survive it, and still be somebody who listened to Dutchy describe the dream he’d had the night before, and asked tons of questions to tease him about it (“Yeah, but was the flying giraffe lady pretty? What was she wearing? Could you see her ankles?”)

There was a spattering of little circles on Blink’s inner thigh, pale and fading like his stab wound. Cigarette burns. Blink wouldn’t talk about them, not even to Mush, and whenever Mush remembered that they were there, it made him want to protect Blink, to keep the bad people in the world away from him. That was the right thing to do. Friends looked out for each other. 

Blink’s real name was Louis, and his mama had called him that. He was beautiful. He was golden and shining. He had two freckles between his shoulder blades, and the hair under his arms was almost as yellow as the hair on his head. In Mush’s mind it sounded all deep and poetical to talk about Kid Blink’s sunshiney armpits, but he had enough common sense to know that it’d never sound right if he tried to talk about them out loud.

The patch that Blink wore had a glass eye hidden under it, but whoever had put it there hadn’t really tried. It was white, but the white had gotten discolored. There was a little black dot in the middle, and that was it. That dot was awful. It reminded Mush of an insect, a fly sad atop something pale and congealed. Mush didn’t know how anybody could make a glass eye for Blink, and forget to put any blue on it. It didn’t move, and the skin around it looked scratched up and painful. Mush could see why he’d hid it. It’d been stuck there by somebody who didn’t care enough about him to do it right, nobody had asked his permission before hand, and now he couldn’t get it out. Blink didn’t care if Mush saw it, but he didn’t want to look at it himself, and he didn’t want to put it out there for folks weren’t weren’t his best friend, the way Mush was. 

Mush’s body didn’t tell the stories that Blink’s did. Mush was lucky. He’d somehow lived his whole life in orphanages and on the streets, and nobody had ever laid a hand on him, and Mush was only starting to realize how uncommon that was. There were things about him that made him the kind of person who ought to have dealt with people going after him. 

Blink knew that too, and that was one of the reasons that Mush found it hard to look at the world around them and be afraid. He even expected good things to happen, like maybe he and Blink were going to move out of the lodging house and get a place together one day, and then they’d be invincible… invincible and happy, because it was hard not to be when you had somebody who put you above everybody else, somebody who was able to look at you and really see who you were.


End file.
